Smith ScholarWorks

Government: Faculty Publications Government

2021

Civil Disobedience, and What Else? Making Space for Uncivil

Forms of Resistance
Erin Pineda
Smith College, epineda@smith.edu

Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/gov_facpubs

Part of the Political Science Commons

Recommended Citation
Pineda, Erin, "Civil Disobedience, and What Else? Making Space for Uncivil Forms of Resistance" (2021).
Government: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/gov_facpubs/52

This Book Review has been accepted for inclusion in Government: Faculty Publications by an authorized
administrator of Smith ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@smith.edu
Review Article EJPT
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(1) 157–164
Civil disobedience, and ! The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
what else? Making space sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1474885119845063
for uncivil forms journals.sagepub.com/home/ept

of resistance

Erin R Pineda
Smith College, USA

Candice Delmas, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should be Uncivil, Oxford University Press:
New York, 2018; 312 pp. $29.95, ISBN 9780190872199 (hardcover).

Abstract
Theorists of political obligation have long devoted special attention to civil disobedi-
ence, establishing its pride of place as an object of philosophical analysis, and as one of a
short list of exceptions to an otherwise binding obligation to obey the law. Yet all of this
attention to civil disobedience has left the broader terrain of resistance to injustice
relatively under-theorized. What other forms of action are justifiable – even required –
in the face of systemic injustice? Candice Delmas’ A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience
Should Be Uncivil offers an original and powerful defense of the idea that we have a duty
to resist, and that carrying out this duty may sometimes require going beyond civil
disobedience – engaging in forms of action that are evasive, shocking, violent, or oth-
erwise deemed “uncivil.” Building on a wealth of recent scholarship and a rich set of
examples, Delmas grounds the duty to resist in the same principles that political
philosophers routinely use to defend an obligation to obey the law: the natural duty
of justice, the principle of fair play, Samaritan duties to rescue others from peril, and the
associative duties of membership. In making room for uncivil forms of dissent, however,
I contend that Delmas ironically hollows out the category of civil disobedience, wed-
ding it too tightly to a principle of decorum, and isolating it from protest that exceeds
the boundaries of the communicative. Nevertheless, A Duty to Resist is an excellent –
and much needed – contribution to the literature on dissent and disobedience.

Corresponding author:
Erin R Pineda, Assistant Professor of Government, Smith College, Wright Hall 104, Northampton, MA 01063,
USA.
Email: epineda@smith.edu
158 European Journal of Political Theory 20(1)

Keywords
civil disobedience, resistance, protest, dissent, incivility, civility, political obligation

In the tradition of liberal and democratic theory, civil disobedience and forms of
principled lawbreaking are often confronted as limited exceptions to an otherwise
binding obligation to obey the law. Particularly in liberal democracies, where the law
is presumed to be the product of legitimate institutions that citizens have an interest
in maintaining, breaking the law in protest—even for good reasons—becomes nor-
matively troubling. For Peter Singer (1973: 59), for example, there are “special
reasons for obeying the law in a democracy,” given that laws, however imperfect,
represent a “fair compromise between competing claims to power.” By continuing to
participate in the institutions and practices of a democracy, moreover, citizens take
on a “prima facie obligation to accept the results” of the decision-procedures that
order institutions. Though operating with a different account of political obligation,
John Rawls (1999: 335) similarly theorizes political obligation and the moral justi-
fication for lawbreaking within the horizons of a settled, legitimate constitutional
order—a society that he thinks of as the “nearly just” state. Civil disobedience, then,
operates as a limited exception to the constitutional rule.
Such is the common philosophical starting point for thinking about when we are
justified in breaking the law in protest. Yet, as David Lyons (1998) has argued,
activists—including paradigmatic practitioners of disobedience from Henry David
Thoreau to Martin Luther King, Jr—tend to defend their actions in terms of a
different set of moral demands: the responsibility to respond to and rectify injustice.
Thoreau (1996: 10) famously suggested that in an unjust society “the true place for a
just man is . . . a prison,” while King (2001: 87) explained his own disobedient actions
by insisting that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Candice
Delmas’ excellent book, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should be Uncivil,
takes this language of moral and political duty seriously, asking if and when it might
be our responsibility to resist injustice, and arguing carefully and persuasively that
political obligation should not be equated with the duty to obey the law. As she
contends, “[g]iven our less-than-ideal polities, obeying the law is neither the sole, nor
necessarily the most important, of our political obligations” (p. 106).
A Duty to Resist pursues two large theoretical claims: First, we have a positive
duty to resist injustice that sometimes requires us to engage in unlawful action; and
second, we are potentially justified in using a range of actions, beyond civil disobe-
dience, to carry out this duty—including forms of action that we deem uncivil and
even violent. The bulk of A Duty to Resist works in service of the first claim, which
Delmas pursues through a novel and effective argumentative strategy: her concep-
tion of the duty to resist is grounded in the same principles that political philoso-
phers routinely use to defend an obligation to obey the law. Building on a wealth of
recent scholarship on political obligation and a rich set of historical and contempo-
rary examples, Delmas examines in turn the natural duty of justice (Chapter 3), the
Pineda 159

principle of fair play (Chapter 4), Samaritan duties to rescue others from peril
(Chapter 5) and the associative duties generated by “dignitary political membership”
(Chapter 6). In each case, she demonstrates that accepting the bounds of a political
obligation to obey—whether based on our participation in a mutually-beneficial
cooperative social scheme, or a natural duty to support, maintain, and establish
just institutions—also means accepting an obligation to resist injustice, up to and
including illegal acts of “principled disobedience.” Thus, on Delmas’ account, “basic
liberal commitments can and do have far-reaching and radical implications for how
we ought to respond to injustice around us,” despite the fact that “radical activists”
tend to view these very commitments as “barriers to resistance” (p. 225).
Throughout these chapters, Delmas’ text is attentive to the different sites,
scales, and types of injustice, and provides an account of the duty to resist that is
responsive to contextual considerations as well as the distinct duties of differently-
situated actors. Our duties to justice and democracy, for example, generate obliga-
tions to redress not just the kinds of blatant rights violations that animated Rawls’
(1999) influential defense of civil disobedience, nor the forms of deliberative malfunc-
tion that concern deliberative democrats like William Smith (2013). In addition to
these, Delmas argues, we may have duties to resist due to “official misconduct” and
political corruption; pervasive public ignorance sustained by governmental secrecy;
and the mistreatment and abuse of nonmembers of the polity. The types of action
demanded to redress these injustices—as well as the other forms of peril, disrespect,
exploitation, and indignity explored in this book—range from seeking out good infor-
mation, to communicating and drawing attention to injustice, to pursuing direct
means of rectifying injustice—whether that means shielding vulnerable groups from
institutionalized harms, acting in solidarity with the oppressed through protest and
disobedience, or asserting one’s own dignity in the face of its denial.
Confronted with the enormity and complexity of real-world injustice, we might
object that living up to such a duty to resist would impose costs too heavy for the
average person to bear. But here Delmas is unflinching: if we are to take the idea of
political obligation seriously, and if we accept that all polities (including liberal
democracies) regularly inflict forms of systemic harm on members as well as non-
members, then we have to reckon with the fact that we may have duties—natural
as well as associative—to resist the injustice we see. Even so, as Delmas advises,
these duties may be no more onerous than those implied by other accounts of
political obligation—understood in narrow terms as a duty to obey the law.
Writing about the political obligations generated by fair play, Delmas cautions:

when fairness is used to ground the moral duty to obey the law, it is understood to
require substantial sacrifices, such as paying taxes or fighting in a conscript army. If
discharging the duty of fair play can involve substantial sacrifices, the same may be
presumed about the fairness-based duty to resist. (pp. 133–134)

While the riskiest, costliest, and least accepted means of resisting—sabotage,

evasion, vigilantism, and so on—may not be the only means of fulfilling a duty to
160 European Journal of Political Theory 20(1)

resist, sometimes they might prove to be the most effective means (or simply the
means of last resort). This brings us to the second prong of Delmas’ argument: to
theorize a broader range of actions available for contesting injustice, beyond the
typically acceptable means of legal protest and civil disobedience. In distinction to
recent “inclusive” accounts of civil disobedience, which grapple with systemic
injustice and severe democratic deficits by expanding the category of civil disobe-
dience to include a diversity of seemingly “uncivil” tactics,1 Delmas takes the
opposite tack: she (more or less) accepts the narrow parameters that typically
define civil disobedience but argues that we can justify numerous actions that
exceed them. This approach has the benefit of acknowledging the unlikelihood
of convincing the public that something like ecosabotage counts as properly
“civil”—thus meeting Delmas’ standard of political utility—while also taking acti-
vists seriously when they explicitly frame their actions as purposefully uncivil—
thus meeting the standard of “phenomenological accuracy” (pp. 37–38).
Yet if contemporary “inclusive” theorists of civil disobedience stretch the cate-
gory of civil disobedience beyond recognition (at least on Delmas’ account), I
wonder if she does not make the opposite mistake—constricting it so far that its
usefulness is in doubt. If liberal conceptions of duties to justice and Samaritan rescue
can be repurposed for radical arguments, despite activist suspicion of them, is there
not an opportunity here to read the civil disobedience against the grain—even if
there are good reasons for doing so in narrower terms than Celikates or Brownlee?
In making space for uncivil disobedience, Delmas accepts much of the liberal con-
sensus about what defines civil disobedience: it is action that is illegal but public,
non-evasive, nonviolent, and decorous—the latter of which requires that “citizens
who want to enter the public sphere ought to behave in a dignified and polite manner
and avoid causing offense” (p. 42). In line with Rawlsian principles of public reason
and the “duty of civility,” Delmas interprets the demand for decorum somewhat
capaciously, and thus characterizes as “uncivil” a surprising range of actions that we
might think of as ordinary, civil disobedience—disrupting trade on the floor of the
New York Stock Exchange (p. 57); protesting at churches by chanting, disrupting
mass, blocking the aisles, and desecrating communion wafers (p. 57); using road
blocks to disrupt traffic (p. 43); shouting down an invited speaker (p. 43); or engag-
ing in hunger strikes and work stoppages (p. 184)—all of which in one way or
another entail actions too disruptive, rude, offensive, or psychologically and eco-
nomically coercive to meet the standards of decorum.
Ironically, then, there may be times that the lines Delmas draws violate her
own standards of “phenomenological accuracy,” in the sense that tactics that
activists may adopt self-consciously as forms of civil disobedience are now
defined as outside its bounds. As Delmas rightly argues, activists who position
themselves as deliberately “uncivil” are making notable political claims about
themselves, their goals, their positionality, and their relationship to a script for
disobedience that often operates as a “counter-resistance ideology,” in Delmas’
terms (p. 29). Yet political actors who adopt for themselves the mantle of “civil”
disobedience—particularly amidst accusations of incivility, violence, or
Pineda 161

illegitimacy—are making no less significant claims about themselves and the way
they wish to be received. When Martin Luther King, Jr insisted that the 1963
Birmingham campaign fitted into a long tradition of civil disobedience—even as
newspaper editorials nationwide castigated the protests as ill-timed, disruptive,
irresponsible, and uncivil—he was claiming civic space and citizen status for
Black Americans within a cultural tradition and sociopolitical order that disav-
owed them. And he was offering a radical rebuttal to a notion of civility defined
in terms of a dominant majority’s preferences for the tranquility of non-
disruption over the chaotic and disruptive struggle for justice (see King, 2001;
see also Shulman, 2008: 97–129). Notably, King insisted on this while simulta-
neously emphasizing that coercion, disruption, and institutional crisis would be
required in the fight for racial justice. Despite Delmas’ intentions to use the
distinction between civil and uncivil disobedience to call out bad faith charges
of incivility, I cannot see how a line drawn at the boundaries of decorum can
plausibly help us do this work.
My concern, then, is not really about the somewhat nitpicky question of which
specific actions fall into which category. Rather, I would contend that the require-
ment that civil disobedients “avoid causing offense,” outrage, or even
“inconvenience” (p. 44) raises real questions about who is able to position them-
selves as acting with decorum, and relatedly, about the efficacy of civil disobedience
(so-defined) against the sprawling, enormous injustices that Delmas cares most
about. Who else but those who can already take their equal standing for
granted—those individuals who are already assured of their accepted status as legit-
imate political actors, as speakers and citizens—can meet a standard so inherently
tied to the existing order’s own sense of itself? What power can civil disobedience
have (and for whom) if its standards are reliant on dominant groups’ racialized,
gendered, and class-based perceptions of unruliness—let alone their desire to live
free from inconvenience? As Linda Zerilli (2014: 116) writes in her critique of civility:

The idea of civility has always relied on a highly homogenous conception of the
public, a conception in which mostly white, mostly male citizens found themselves
in an unsurprising agreement about the fundamental moral and political values of
American liberal democracy. . . . The accusation of incivility, in other words, has been
a familiar means for denying the political (and thus common) quality of [the claims of
outsiders] and making them sound instead as if they were “merely subjective” out-
bursts of one sort or another.

Delmas herself points to the facility with which powerful groups raise the charge of
incivility against oppressed groups; yet the standard of decorum seems to grant
them all the reason they need for doing so.
If offense and rudeness mark one explicit set of boundaries distinguishing the civil
from the uncivil, the differences between symbolic and direct action form another
more implicit one. Throughout Delmas’ exploration of the text’s manifold exam-
ples, I was struck by the way in which she routinely placed activists that engage in
162 European Journal of Political Theory 20(1)

strategies of direct intervention on the uncivil side of the divide. More precisely,
while Delmas notes that there may be acts of uncivil disobedience that seek to
dramatize, communicate, or reveal an injustice to the broader public, “many do
not aim to persuade an audience – seeking instead to prevent or redress wrongs” (p.
45). On the other side of the divide, fidelity to the principle of decorum would seem
to demand that civil disobedience operate (perhaps primarily) as a communicative
act, because it requires respectful, persuasive engagement with the public, within the
limits of public reason. Moreover, strategies of disruption—such as blocking traffic
on the Triborough Bridge with garbage collected from neglected East Harlem
schools (as the Congress of Racial Equality did in 1964), or engaging in work
stoppages and hunger strikes in violation of prison policy (as inmates at Pelican
Bay State Prison did in 2013)—create precisely the conditions that violate decorum:
offense, coercion, institutional breakdown, and certainly inconvenience. Civil dis-
obedience, then, trespasses its definitional limits when it crosses from the symbolic
into the direct. Perhaps for this reason, Delmas notes that civil disobedience cannot
possibly “vex the status quo” in the ways that uncivil disobedience can (p. 65).
Reading civil disobedience as inherently communicative is certainly in line with
the liberal-democratic consensus about it: civil disobedience is a “mode of address,”
as Rawls (1999: 321) puts it; it is “exclusively symbolic,” in Jurgen Habermas’ (1985:
99) terms.2 Yet, as Jennifer Welchman (2001) argues, the move to categorize civil
disobedience primarily as a form of communicative action is of relatively recent
philosophical vintage—and it marks a rather dramatic shift from a long activist
tradition of thinking about civil disobedience as but one of many tools of direct
action. The fact that we now take this idea to be somewhat obvious is one of the
many ways that political theories of civil disobedience remain hostage to Rawlsian
frameworks, assumptions, and categories of analysis—despite a vibrant intellectual
tradition, connecting American abolitionism to global anticolonial struggles to the
long years of the civil rights movement and beyond, in which civil disobedience
gained credibility precisely as a means of direct intervention, a means of generating
social crises and “vexing the status quo.” To borrow Robin Celikates’ (2016b: 42–
43) words, “without moments of real confrontation (that will in many instances be
seen and categorized as violent),” civil disobedience would be little more than “a
mere appeal to the conscience of the powers that be and their respective majorities.”
That is, might cease to be effective at all—capable of serving as a tactical vehicle for
claims and causes that really challenge the way things are.
Thus, all of this raises a real problem for the efficacy of civil disobedience, if we
understand it the way that Delmas does: What would the effect of actions meeting
her standards be, in the context of significant, systemic injustice? Much to Delmas’
credit, her text displays an acute sensitivity to the depth and dimensions of con-
temporary injustice, and the multiple forms of vulnerability, violence, exploitation,
and peril that routinely plague people’s lives and livelihoods. She is also attentive
to the ways in which living amidst systemic injustice, and particularly living as
products of its differential privileges and deprivations, distorts and affects our
moral psychology: “Privilege thus breeds blindness and blindness reinforces
Pineda 163

privilege, since being privileged is being able, even encouraged, to fail to see the
oppressive system and the privileges it grants” (p. 204). This dynamic is what
Charles Mills (1997: 18), in the context of white supremacy, refers to as an
“epistemology of ignorance”—an “agreement to misinterpret the world, but with
the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epi-
stemic authority, whether religious or secular.” In light of the grave (and often life-
threatening) assaults on dignity, bodily integrity, equity, freedom, and democracy
that structure our political worlds, and given an epistemic context in which the
beneficiaries of white supremacy, patriarchy, or capitalist exploitation are more
likely to disavow than acknowledge claims of injustice, I am not sure the purely
symbolic, decorous, or polite is going to cut it.3
One might suspect that, for Delmas, our world is simply too unjust for civil disobe-
dience; it’s time for us to be uncivil. I would be inclined to agree, if I had to take her
categories as a given. Yet she is not quite willing to jettison civil disobedience: her project
seeks to expand the terrain for resisting injustice beyond it, not displace it entirely. Based
on the way she carves out space for the uncivil, however, I am left wondering what the
purchase of retaining its civil counterpart is, at all—beyond, perhaps, our historical
attachment to it as an idea. What I think is missing here is the recognition of the ways
that the line between civil and uncivil is politically constructed: it is the product of a
contested, contentious process of political claim-making between activists and specta-
tors, subjects and citizens, institutions and individuals—not a matter of any particular
action’s correspondence with a set of a priori normative categories.
These questions aside, I take Delmas’ broader point to be that we can and should
create normative space for forms of resistance that are evasive, coercive, or shocking,
even when we cannot agree on their civility. While I have taken issue with Delmas’
conceptualization of civil disobedience, it bears emphasis that her way of delimiting it –
placing civil disobedience within the confines of decorum, nonviolence, publicity, and
non-evasion—is part of a strategy to put civil disobedience in its place, in order to think
critically about the forms of action that lie beyond it. This, I think, is both eminently
worthwhile and, in Delmas’ book, very well done. For mid-20th century liberal theo-
rists of civil disobedience such as Rawls, civil disobedience and conscientious objection
became privileged objects of analysis because they represented the narrow terms of a
citizen’s right to violate the law within states that were presumptively legitimate, liberal
democracies. What Delmas systematically and compellingly demonstrates is that our
political obligations as well as our latitude to disobey are far more expansive, given the
scale and scope of injustice, violence, and exploitation around us. On this front,
Delmas’ book stands as an original and significant contribution, and a challenge to
accounts which fail to seriously consider what we owe to each other when we live
within—and particularly when we benefit from—the conditions of systemic injustice.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
164 European Journal of Political Theory 20(1)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

ORCID iD
Erin R Pineda http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0373-1311

Notes
1. Delmas focuses on the work of Robin Celikates (2014, 2016a) and Kimberlee Brownlee
(2012) as emblematic of this approach.
2. It also comports with more recent accounts, such as Brownlee’s (2012) and
Smith’s (2013).
3. This is the precise epistemic context, I would argue, that forges our ideas about what
counts as decorous, respectful, civil, or nonviolent.

References
Brownlee K (2012) Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Celikates R (2014) Civil disobedience as a practice of civic freedom. In: Owen D (ed.) On
Global Citizenship: James Tully in Dialogue. London: Bloomsbury Press, pp. 207–228.
Celikates R (2016a) Democratizing civil disobedience. Philosophy & Social Criticism
42(10): 982–994.
Celikates R (2016b) Rethinking civil disobedience as a practice of contestation – Beyond the
liberal paradigm. Constellations 23(1): 37–45.
Habermas J (1985) Civil disobedience: Litmus test for the democratic constitutional state.
Berkeley Journal of Sociology 30: 95–116.
King ML (2001) Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Signet Classics.
Lyons D (1998) Moral judgment, historical reality, and civil disobedience. Philosophy and
Public Affairs 27(1): 31–49.
Mills C (1997) The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Rawls J (1999) A Theory of Justice. Rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shulman G (2008) American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Singer P (1973) Democracy and Disobedience. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Smith W (2013) Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge.
Thoreau TD (1996) Resistance to civil government. In: Rosenblum N (ed.) Thoreau:
Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–21.
Welchman J (2001) Is ecosabotage civil disobedience? Philosophy & Geography 4(1): 97–107.
Zerilli L (2014) Against civility: A feminist perspective. In: Sarat A (ed.) Civility, Legality,
and Justice in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107–131.